Week 1 Observation #2

Glasses Speaking

He seemed like a content man. He smiled often, almost at the end of every sentence. It was almost like the physical manifestation of a full stop.
He spoke, paused and then smiled. A full teeth affair that seemed to be inherently linked with the muscles in his eyelids, as they too slid closed when he grinned quickly before continuing with the next sentence.
After a while, it felt a little disingenuous, but I didn’t mind.

If I had to describe him, I would say he wore glasses. If the police asked me to describe him to a sketch artist, the result would probably be a detailed and accurate depiction of these glasses. The thick, black, rounded, rectangular frames were the most distinct feature of a rather forgettable face. The glasses had blended into the features that comprised his face so much, that when he removed them mid-sentence to clean the smudged lenses, it was quite shocking. It was like he took off his nose, or removed an ear to scratch behind it more effectively.
Using his untucked collared t-shirt, he pinched the bridge of his glasses and nestled them in-between a fold of the bottom of his shirt. He began cleaning the glasses. His did this for a while, rubbing the shirt material back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, over the lenses.

I felt like it would make for a faster process if he brought them up to his mouth and breathed condensation on the lenses (I am no expert on the process but I’d seen lots of people do that when cleaning glasses.) But then, of course, I realised his mouth was very much occupied with talking and his manneristic grinning punctuation.

After a longer while still, a quick glance down must have revealed satisfaction with the cleaning endeavour, because thankfully, he then put his face back together.